It was 5:30 in the evening. The sky was a particular hue of orange. The orange that evokes loneliness, gets people depressive. The solitary eagle was circling the central lawn of the apartment complex, which comprised six identical towers. The cawing of the crows was piercing through the ghostly quiet of the complex. On the 19th floor apartment of Tower B, the door of the living room balcony was open. Inside the apartment, a mobile phone lying on the dining table was vibrating. The display screen flashed ‘6 Missed Calls’.
The phone didn’t distract him. He continued his slow walk towards the balcony. It was Twenty-Four feet away from where he stood near the kitchen. Twelve square tiles, Two feet each. The laptop on the table, which he walked past, was playing ‘Instrumental Jazz Evenings’. He reached the edge of the balcony and leant against the railing, as he often would. He looked down, taking stock of the scene below. The children’s play area was empty, as had been for many months. The grass around the slides had grown a foot high. The red and blue paint on the swings had started to come off, exposing rust and decay. The community pool was empty, green moss had covered most of the blue tiles.
He looked back into the apartment. He seemed to be scanning the apartment for something, but couldn’t quite find it. He then turned back, and with a swift leap, climbed to the top of the railing. The sequence had such an unhesitating quality, it seemed it had been rehearsed many times before. He balanced himself on the railing platform. And waited. The other five towers stood as hapless witnesses.
That morning, just like every morning, Mir was up at 7:30. He had been up late into the night watching ‘Air Crash Investigations’ on YouTube. The first sign of hitting middle age is the inability to sleep for long hours. There is something enviable about young people who can sleep for long hours, while the world might be tearing itself into pieces right across the street. And there is something joyless, as routine things are, about waking up at a fixed time every day, without ever needing an alarm.
Every morning — eyes barely open, Mir’s hands would reach out for the phone on the side table. The bright screen would light up his face in the dark curtained room. The notifications on the phone would make him anxious. The colored blocks on the calendar would deflate him of any energy that he might have renewed from a night of poor sleep. So it went.
‘Myth of Sisyphus’, by Albert Camus sat on the side table. It had been lying there for the past eight months. Mir had highlighted a line in the book, “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying”.
Reema had already left for the hospital by the time Mir was up. Home for her, since the past year, had only served the functional need of getting six hours of sleep, away from the sounds of beeping monitors and sobbing family members. But she never complained. She, in fact, showed the cadence of a marathon runner who was only getting started. Her face looked shinier each day.
Mir would shake his head, mumbling to himself, like old bitter men. He had stopped believing that anyone could actually like what they did. An uncontested passion for something would splinter from within and find its counter. Whenever he read or heard anything which had the phrase ‘passion for work’, he was sure some bullshit was to follow. He had deleted his LinkedIn account last year.
Mir walked out to the living room and made himself a kadak chai. Not having to endure the insipid green tea at the office was one of the fringe benefits of working from home. Green tea, he was convinced, was another devious corporate cost-cutting conspiracy to make employees drink less tea. Visitors too.
“Can I get you some tea?”
“Umm, sure.”
“We have green tea”, the host would proudly announce
“Water is good, thanks”
Meow, the 9-year-old dog, a poodle, was lying in front of the kitchen door — sunken eyes, cheeks drooping on the floor, dry balding patches on the coat. He had been like this for a year now. Meow had been diagnosed with Dog Dysthymia last year. The vet mentioned that it was a form of dementia where they lose awareness of their body length and size.
Since the past year, Meow would often get himself stuck under the dining chair, or in between the sofas, while all he needed to do was walk backwards.
“Just be a bit vigilant”, the vet had said to Mir, “He isn’t getting any younger”
A film of grime had formed at the bottom of his water bowl. The chew toys had become a tenth of their original size. Mir had stopped ordering the Norwegian Dog Salmon Oil, which his cousin would carry from the US.
The living room had an old colonial style crockery cum anything-goes cabinet. It had taken eight men just to load it into the elevator. The cabinet held tarnished bronze trophies, picked up at meaningless school and college events. These trophies were a conspiracy, Mir knew. A conspiracy to raise kids with false expectations about their abilities, and keep them disappointed all their lives.
The wall beside the cabinet had a picture of him playing the drums for his school band. He was the best drummer in his pin-code. At the left corner of the image, in the background, the generator room of the school was visible. It was where he had ‘kissed’ Naina for the first time. A faint touch of the lip on the lip, really. Even now, if he would want to think of something pleasant, that would vanquish all negative thoughts, and put him to sleep, his mind would wander back to the whirr of the generator room that afternoon. Naina had moved to Cleveland, Ohio for her P.H.D., and never returned. He hadn’t seen her since school, but knew — that the pool in her backyard had a fountain statue in one corner, that her golden retriever had just given birth to a litter, that her six-year-old daughter was a ballet prodigy.
Dozens of empty bottles of beer had started covering one corner of the living room. They didn’t seem to bother Reema. Mir was bothered that Reema didn’t seem to bother. He picked up the phone and sent a message to Reema.
“Hate the way things are. What are we doing with our lives?”.
He noticed Reema had seen the message thirty-five minutes back, but hadn’t replied.
Through the day, Meow would seek cool corners on the tiled kitchen floor. Mir would be talking to the computer all day in the living room. He would call out to Meow while making quick beer runs in the kitchen in between his calls. Mir worked at an IT-services company. The kind where employees have to hang the ID cards in their belt loops.
“I feel the salary credit at the beginning of each month is a paralyzing weakness”, he had said to Reema once, when both lay on the bed waiting for sleep to come. It was a moment of great clarity, he had thought.
Hot showers also lent him moments of ‘great clarity’. A hundred new ideas for carving out a life different from the one he had would germinate in his head while standing under the hot shower.
The new CEO, a young man, about Mir’s age was brought in to shake things up at the company, and bring in ‘a culture of innovation’. He had been repeating the same phrases in every interaction — ‘become self-starters’, ‘self-govern’, that he was here to ‘demolish hierarchy’, and all such things.
The organization was quick to adapt to working remotely. There was an 18-page ‘Work From Home Manual’ with lots of cartoonish illustrations that was circulated by the HR. It contained a step-by-step breakdown of what the company wanted the ’new normal’ to look like.
“What new normal?”, Mir would mumble, “there is nothing normal about these times”.
The document contained things like —
1. Take a shower in the morning, like you would on an office day
2. Wear designated office attire before you sit at your workstation
It reminded Mir of those ‘Cleanliness is Godliness’ charts that he used to take cutouts from for school projects — where a boy named Ram would wake up at 5:00 am, brush his teeth, and rinse himself thoroughly in the shower.
The manual mentioned a minimum number of hours that everyone needed to stay logged in, which would be time-stamped and tracked on a common dashboard. The system would automatically flag the employees who had clocked less than eight hours. The company was making sure the employees became ‘self-starters’.
The video conferencing screen had multiple talking heads lined up in a neat grid. The Snr. Manager was having a ’strategy meeting’, which could have just as easily been called a ‘meeting’. Mir was already on his second beer. He lit a cigarette. He would steal quick puffs moving away from the camera.
“Mir, are you there, can you hear us?”, a square block on the computer spoke.
Mir, coughing, clearing his throat, “Yeah, yeah, I am there. What’s up?”
“You didn’t shower again, today?”, said the voice, half-jokingly
“Seems Mir is in total holiday mode”, spoke another square block
“Guys, let’s get started”, the manager intervened.
Mir checked his phone to see if Reema had replied. She hadn’t. By the time the meeting wrapped up, Mir had downed three pints.
Mir was leading a team that was responsible for ‘automating workflows’ — which was another way of saying the company was replacing people with machines. About 25% of the customer support team would lose their jobs. “Good for those 25%”, he thought.
If he was going to be honest, this was the most meaningful work he had undertaken in months. Most of his work boiled down to opening mails and write one word replies. Nine out of ten mails he was marked on didn’t need him to do anything. It was a conspiracy to distract and maintain the state of frenetic shallowness, Mir knew. They called it ‘being on the same page’, ‘keeping you in the loop’ and other such things.
Mir would look forward to his 2:00 pm post-lunch walk in the jogging track below. 2:00 pm also meant less elevator traffic — avoid unpleasant people, avoid their suspended breaths. Every time the elevator would stop between floors, he would feel like punching the elevator wall. He’d reserve a special contempt for the person entering the elevator. He thought of elevators as a conspiracy — a sociological experiment to pack familiar faced strangers in a closed space and study their discomfort.
The afternoon walk coincided with the red haired fitness instructor who would be out on her run. Does she notice him, he would wonder? They had exchanged a few glances at the gym. He had handed her the plastic glass at the water cooler once. But Mir didn’t think she remembered
Mir got back to the apartment, as his calendar notification reminded him of another team meeting. By then he was quite buzzed with all the beer. He poured dry kibble in Meow’s unwashed food bowl. It was well past Meow’s mealtime. But neither Mir nor did Meow seem to care. Meow walked up to the food bowl, inspected it for a few seconds, and walked away. Mir drank two more bottles of beer, as he nodded through the meeting. Then he got up abruptly from his workstation. Before leaving the phone on the table, he checked it again. Reema hadn’t replied yet.
The phone rang for the eighth time. He was already standing on top of the railing by then, looking straight into the setting sun. And then, as if the mind had snapped from the body, it lunged forward. The head hit the asphalt first. There was an ugly splatter sound which could be heard all the way up to the 19th floor.
Mir heard it from the washroom. He had a bad feeling about it. He rushed out and instinctively jogged towards the balcony. As he looked down, a pool of blood had started forming around Meow’s skull.
loved it abhimanyu. subscribed too! keep up the good work
Excellent writing!